The Quantum Thief

Last spring, Dan Shipper at Every introduced me to Quinten Farmer. Quinten and his team at Portola were building Tolan, a new kind of AI companion: cute, friendly little animated aliens, each with a unique personality that evolves as you get to know them and form memories together.

But Quinten had a problem: Where did Tolans come from? Why were they eager to befriend humans via an app? What was their deal? Who were they, really? They had a beautifully designed, masterfully engineered character without a backstory, so he asked if I could help them invent a world that would give Tolans depth and context, that would bring them to life.

I was skeptical. Was this really something the world needed? But the more I learned, the more curious I became. Pixar started out selling innovative graphics computers, but only succeeded after leveraging its own technology to make insanely great feature films. As LLMs have exploded over the past couple years, I’ve been wondering who will succeed, not by building and selling tools, but by leveraging those tools to make something extraordinary that people genuinely connect with, something that never could have existed otherwise. As I got to know the team at Portola, I realized that if anyone could do it, it was them.

So I signed on, and for the past nine months I’ve been quietly developing Tolan lore and working closely with the team to figure out what it means to create compelling narrative experiences in this uncharted format.

This week, Portola made its first public announcement and Fast Company published a wonderful deep dive into the creative process behind Tolan. We currently have 500k+ downloads, well over $1m in ARR, are in the top .01% of apps on the App Store, and just raised a $10 million seed round from Lachy Groom, Mike Krieger, Nat Friedman, David Luan, Amjad Masad, and others.

This is just the beginning. People talk a lot about AI writing tools, but, as a writer, what excites me is exploring the unique affordances LLMs offer as a new narrative medium, akin to the advent of novels, radio, film, or games. Working on this project, I'm constantly asking myself what kinds of stories can only exist because of AI, and how we can best use these tools to do what stories do best: move people.

If you try Tolan, I’d love to hear what you think.

Oh, and speaking of novels, don’t worry, I’m currently in revisions on a new manuscript…

And now, a book I love that you might too:

The Jean le Flambeur trilogy by Hannu Rajaniemi—The Quantum Thief, The Fractal Prince, and The Causal Angel—may be the most ambitious science-fiction story I’ve ever read. It takes place in a far future where people can translate their minds from biological brain to software and back, spin up infinite simulated worlds, create billions of copies of themselves, manipulate matter down to the atomic level, use tiny black holes as power sources, and much, much more. It almost feels like some kind of psychedelic fantasy, except that all of it is scientifically plausible in the universe we happen to live in. But this isn’t a dry speculative treatise. It’s a blazing fast, in media res story about a master thief pulling off a series of heists that will change the very fabric of reality and make you question the stories you tell yourself about who you are.

Things worth sharing:

• When I’m not writing, I’m surfing, so when OpenAI released their new Deep Research feature, I tested it by asking for surf tips tailored to my goals, skills, body, boards, and local conditions. The results were surprisingly useful, so I built a tool, Surf Beta, that friends can use to order their own personalized pointers.

• Ray Nayler, Where the Axe is Buried: “We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.”

• Now more than ever, I’m proud that we dedicated True Blue to raising money for ProPublica.

• For me, writing a novel feels eerily similar to reading one: at the beginning I’m trying to figure out what’s going on and by the end I can’t wait to find out what happens next.

• With social media squashing links and moving to algorithmic feeds, it’s gotten much harder to share and discover good writing online, so now I read fewer blog posts and more books. All in all, not a bad trade.

• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: “‘If you can see a thing whole,’ he said, ‘it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’”

Thanks for reading. We all find our next favorite book because someone we trust recommends it. So when you fall in love with a story, tell your friends. Culture is a collective project in which we all have a stake and a voice.

Best, Eliot

Eliot Peper is the author of Foundry, Reap3r, Veil, Breach, Borderless, Bandwidth, Neon Fever Dream, Cumulus, Exit Strategy, Power Play, and Version 1.0. He also works on special projects.

“Relentlessly readable. Be warned, if you start, you probably won't stop.”
-San Francisco Magazine on Version 1.0